February 2009

28 February 2009

Montesano, Washington, is a beautiful, small, unassuming city in the County of Grays Harbor. Nestled in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains, It is surrounded by lush pastureland and drives along highway 8 come with views of small groups of milk cattle amongst the trees. In Montesano, there is a little fast food restaurant. A very normal, family owned, honest, fast food restaurant.

The family that owned the restaurant had two long time trusted employees who served as managers. The family knew the restaurant was in good hands. When the long term employees left, the family was worried. Fast food restaurants hire young, minimum wage workers who often slack off or even steal from the register.

The owners felt they needed to keep an eye on the restaurant. So they installed cameras.

Then they’d watch.

If the employees were just standing around talking to each other, they’d call up and say, “Why are you just standing around? Do something on the chore list!” For the owners, each time that required a call justified the surveillance.

The chore list, while comprehensive, was very short. Keep the place clean and the services filled. Montesano doesn’t have many people. But rushes require a certain staffing. Standing around was inevitable.

So the employees found themselves filling full salts, cleaning clean floors and hiding directly underneath the cameras in the “blind spots” just to have a simple conversation. They never wanted to appear “not busy.”

As a team, the employees only could rally around one thing – their hatred of the cameras. They couldn’t talk to each other, learn about each other, or learn from each other. They could all merely mindlessly perform the already-satisfied chore list.

One by one, the other employees all left. None of them would ever become the new long-time and trusted employees because trust was never allowed to develop.

22 February 2009

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

In lean management, a pull system is a natural flow of activities driven by the natural pace of the work that produces value. Today I stumbled across this quote from Viktor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search for Meaning is surely one of the top 10 influential books on my world view. In this quote, Frankl suggests that goals are a pull system.

Goals are indeed a pull system. Goals come from internal processes. We have individual and shared goals that motivate us to act.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

~ Sid Caesar

Goals pull us, we ideally act based on goals. These individual actions are tasks. The tasks we take on are in service of the goals. However, if we don’t actually enjoy what we’re doing in service of these goals or, worse yet, act contrary to our goals – we are squandering our lives.

In a business context, if goals are clear amongst teams and the organization, the work involved in achieving those goals is more likely to be rewarding. We are happier in doing it. And this is a pull process.

A beneficial by-product of pull systems is they reduce waste. Pull systems do this by highlighting where we are operating in ways that stymie our goals. Pull systems reward innovative thinking to remove these points which are constraining our goals. Pull systems say “The constraint is here, it is obvious, are you going to do something about it?”

Though I still have no semblance of a life outside of Nine Inch Nails at the moment, I realize my goals have gone from getting a record deal or selling another record to being a better person, more well-rounded, having friends, having a relationship with somebody.

~ Trent Reznor

Trent Reznor here is saying, “Look, I don’t live to work or work to live. I live to live. I am a musician and it’s my life. But my goals aren’t fame oriented, they are happiness oriented.”

Making music makes Trent happy. Making people laugh made Sid Ceasar happy. Understanding where people found meaning made Viktor Frankl happy.

In an organization, creating good product or solving a problem may make us happy.

At heart, though, the successful application of our talents is what makes most of us happy. When our organizations have no clear definition of goals or work contrary to individual goal achievement – waste is the result. We end up with, as Frankl says, the “push” of drive.

The push of drive is the artificial force necessary to apply to people to get them to work contrary to their own goals.

Enter here the concept of friction. When you apply an external force to an object to get it to move, friction occurs. The amount of friction is the amount of energy lost in the transfer of momentum from one object to another. Loss of energy = waste.

In a pull system, things operate faster by removing friction or constraints. In a push system, things operate faster by applying more force.

For Reznor, the push would be more money, the pull would be self-improvement. Money may drive him, self-improvement motivates him.

When creating rules in organizations or devising ways to get things done – ask yourself “What are the push and pull elements here? What motivates people, and what drives them? Where is friction created? How much friction can we withstand? What friction can be avoided?”

20 February 2009

After the 10 Principles of Social Media for Business came out, people began to engage us on different real-world applications. One of these was the University of Lisbon who asked for a brief thought-exercise. They wanted us to think of ways the 10 Principles would apply to education.

19 February 2009

Agile methods have been applied for the last decade or so to programming teams. The goal with Agile was to take a group of people who were famous for poor communication, unrealistic expectations, and unpredictable deliverables and give them a structure that minimized these elements.

Agile primarily focuses on the following:

Acknowledging that change is part of any endeavor

Greatly increasing the frequency of discourse and review

Assumptions are the rope from which the noose of business is tied

Bill Anderson and I guest-hosted a Yi-Tan call covering how Agile was formed, what its central tenets are, and what it can teach the rest of business.

18 February 2009

A microclimate is a small area that has differing weather than the surrounding area. Architects often design buildings specifically to avoid or create a microclimate. Anyone who ever saw a baseball game in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park quickly learned how poor design and building location could turn a hot day into a cold / windy one.

In business, work groups can easily become cultural microclimates. The degree to which this happens is directly related to the design of your organization. Microclimates can be good or bad. They can make for a windy cold baseball game, or they can shelter you from the elements.

When poorly designed, they can run contrary to your organizational goals. They can either create minor fiefdoms where one person obtains full dictatorial control over a situation, or they can create groupthink in a subgroup that is harmful the company.

The thing is, often we set these up intentionally.

An example of intentional fiefdoms is in the shipping industry. Despite the fact that there are many people working on a ship, true power over the movement of the ship is concentrated on the Master and the Pilot.

Investigators told the National Transportation Safety Board Wednesday that the ship's captain and pilot developed no "shared mental model" on how the ship should pass under the bridge in a heavy fog. For example, the safety officials said there was no discussion of the proper speed.

In this case, a breakdown of communication between two people led to a massive oil spill that cost tens of millions of dollars to clean up and over a hundred million dollars in collateral damage.

The incredible distillation of authority here created a very tiny microclimate. The ship’s pilot was unfamiliar with the waters and didn’t check for fog conditions. The fog was particularly thick and, as you can see in the photo, there’s a lot of room to drive your tanker and not hit the bridge.

By allowing the distillation of power to this point, the system became very brittle. One person was responsible for moving a 901 foot floating ecological and economic disaster. One would have to think that a distributed system of power on the boat would have resulted in a few key changes. Someone would have likely suggested that they ask how bad it was. Someone else would have noted that the pilot wasn’t familiar with the Bay and said, “let’s wait a few hours for the fog to burn off.”

We should watch for microclimates when creating groups. Are they beneficial and sheltering the members so they can do good and focused work? Or are they malevolent, insular or detrimental?

15 February 2009

Monday February 16th at 10:30PST (1:30 EST) I will be doing my second talking-head stint on the Yi-Tan conference call. This time with my good buddy Bill Anderson. We’ll be talking about Agile methodologies and what might come next.

Corey Ladas will also be joining me on the line. All are welcome. Here’s the invite info from Jerry Michalski:

How might we use the precepts of agile programming in general (non-IT) business settings?

It seems that most people think they want leaders who are “decisive”. But a little prodding quickly sees this fall apart. The line between decisive and dictator is blurry at best. A decisive good decision is laudable. A decisive bad decision foments rebellion. Often the difference between the two is dependent on circumstance.

I believe that people confuse clarity with decisiveness. Leaders lead, but should not rule by fiat. When they do, we invariably become disillusioned and alienated.

Decisiveness is also often a hedge for poor planning and lack of vision.

Actual clarity rises from a vision that the leader is so invested in that the rest of the organization can own it and help it evolve. The team is necessary to make the vision happen. But, just as no work plan goes unamended to the end of project, no vision survives close scrutiny unimproved.

Leaders who can’t share ownership of the vision, the execution, and the rewards are not leaders.

As we look in our future for leaders, we may want to ask ourselves:

Is this leader comfortable with leading?

Is this leader willing to allow the group to own the vision? (Is his vision strong enough to share?)

Does this leader make me feel safe without giving up my freedoms?

Does this leader help me understand my place in the company, and does my place allow me self-control?

10 February 2009

Scrum and Agile are wonderful team organizational systems. It’s been easy to see the benefits, but over time, we’ve started to see some issues appear. Since the benefits are measurable and the battle to get Agile accepted has been hard-fought, those that have suggested there may be improvements to the system have been treated with suspicion. No one wants to go back to the mistakes of the past.

Guilds are rarely discussed now, except as anachronisms. However, this morning I got a little jolt that there are some similarities here that make Scrum teams operate like MicroGuilds.

Wikipedia Says:

A guild (or gild) is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest guilds were formed as confraternities of workers.

They are organized in a manner something between a trade union, a cartel and a secret society. They often depended on grants of letters patent by an authority or monarch to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials.

This entry’s tense shifts betray that we not sure if guilds are past tense.

I would argue that much of this applies to our agile teams. Groups are formed that have power as a collective organization, this is in terms of bargaining, information sharing, information hoarding, goal attainment, etc. This is not a bad thing and it is by design. Agile seeks to leverage the individual value and the collective value-add.

They are certainly associations of “persons of craft”.

Let’s look at a few traits for a Scrum team when viewed as a Micro Guild.

Project Focused and Goal Oriented – The original guilds were built to control an industry. Scrum teams are built to control a project. Both are goal oriented. A Scrum team is more likely to be focused on a feature set than on an entire industry.

Ad Hoc and Coworking – Agile teams can be quickly formed and quickly disbanded. Some agile techniques, like peer rotation, rely on this even within the team itself. This is obviously a major departure from a classic guild which made its social capital from permanence.

Insular and Communities of Practice – Guilds and agile teams both work by creating a definable group and sharing vital information within the group. Agile teams quickly morph from project teams to communities of practice as they refine the original goal into a series of steps to create a product. Like guilds, most of this information is captured not in documents, but in tacit knowledge that team members pass from person to person. The only way to benefit from the knowledge of the group is to be accepted into the group and be educated through conversations and through doing.

Vitality – These traits combine, when done correctly, to create a vital working environment. Guilds were initially highly vital organizations that were filled with expansive thinking and innovation. People get together, work towards a common and (hopefully) well defined goal. They exchange information rapidly and effectively, building a team that is learning and improving. They can quickly add or lose staff members because this dynamic is inclusive.

The Warning

Insular, vital and focused teams tend to become very inwardly focused. Within an organization they operate to achieve a goal – but can become defensive of that goal. The rest of the organization can quickly become alienated from the project. Then value-misalignment takes hold rapidly.

Microguilds needs to have a society in which to operate. When an agile team is not having constant communication with the rest of the organization, they will become isolated, they will go off track, and value will be destroyed.

06 February 2009

"The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are working together to provide consumers and partners with social media tools to access information about the ongoing peanut butter and peanut-containing product recalls. This page will be updated as new communication approaches are employed."

Which is to say:

IMPORTANT INFORMATION WILL FOLLOW AFTER INFORMATION ABOUT THE IMPORTANT INFORMATION THAT DESCRIBES IN DETAIL THAT INFORMATION. THIS INFORMATION IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND SHOULD BE VERIFIED BY APPROPRIATE AUTHORITIES. THIS INFORMATION IS IMPORTANT AND SHOULD BE FOLLOWED WITH GRAVE DETERMINATION. HERE COMES THE INFORMATION NOW, AFTER THIS SENTENCE WHICH IS ALMOST OVER AND NOW IT ACTUALLY IS.

02 February 2009

As a kid, I remember getting my first video game system – Super Pong. Soon after that came the TRS-80 color computer. My friends had the rest: Vic-20s, Atari 2600s, Odyssey^2s, and so on.

All I wanted as a kid was to have all the games all the time. That’s it. Nothing special. Just thousands of 8 bit games.

Surely that would be heaven.

30 years later, I have them. All of them. All the Odyssey games, all the vic-20 games, all the Intelevision games, most of the Atari games. All in their original geeked out cartridge form.

I acquired these over a two year period in the 1990s, I found some mailing lists where people who were into this sort of thing had massive auctions. Most of the games were a dollar.

I understand the mind of the collector. Even if my collection was acquired rather quickly.

Many of my friends have done the estate sale route for years. Some to buy things to resell, some to collect things for themselves. They come back with stories that basically make me unwilling to even go to estate sales.

Things of massive importance to these people – but passions seldom shared. Introverted. And, in the end, wasted on estate sale reps who don’t know how to convert them into useful collections. Quite often they are converted into the filling of garbage bags and indiscriminately sent off to the dump.

I also wonder if these passions while they are unshared are sort of like dreams deferred. They cause people to become a little odd. The inability to share makes them into obsessions more than passions. You become holed-up with them.

I would like to believe that affinity groups on the Internet will mitigate this phenomenon. That people of esoteric interests will be able to befriend people of similar interests. They can be extended in a passionate, scholarly, and friendly way through community. Then, in the end, there will a community to take and extend these people’s previously personal passions.